This set of four
cantatas, all written after Bach had been promoted, in the spring
of 1714, from Hoforganist (which position he had held since
1708) to Konzertmeister, at the ducal court of Weimar, is designated
by Chandos as ‘Early Cantatas, Volume 2’; as such, it is a successor
to Chandos 0715. As with the earlier CD, your reaction to this
volume of Weimar Cantatas will, in general terms, depend upon
your attitude towards the post-Joshua-Rifkin fashion (my use
of that word isn’t meant in any derogatory sense) of performing
Bach’s choral works one-voice-per-part, i.e. with no separate
choir, so that the choral writing simply performed by the four
soloists. If you are happy with that approach, then you will
surely find much to enjoy and admire here; if not, then you
will, presumably, know to turn elsewhere.

So far as I can
see the historical evidence concerning O(ne) V(oice) P(er) P(art)
is inconclusive and partially contradictory. That’s a debate
I am not competent to enter, even if I wished to. Speaking simply
as a listener who loves the cantatas, while I would not want
to see OVPP ‘imposed’ as some kind of universal rule, and while
I am far from dismissive of other modes of performance, I think
it is undeniable that there are some advantages, some gains
in clarity and intimacy when the cantatas are (well) performed
OVPP. No doubt there are losses too – but then no one idiom
of performing Bach will never be entirely satisfactory, the
music (and its texts) is too rich, subtle and profound to be
satisfactorily encompassed by any specific formula. Our understanding
of great works of art is always enhanced by experiencing them
via a range of interpretative methods – if you have only ever
seen one performance of Hamlet, or heard one performance
ofthe Hammerklavier then, in a real sense, you haven’t
really seen the play or heard the sonata at all. These are not,
by any means, the greatest of Bach’s choral works, or even of
the cantatas, but they too can benefit from a plurality of approaches,
revealing fresh aspects of themselves each time.

The argument for
OVVP is certainly well served when it underlies a performance
by musicians and singers as skilled and sensitive as the ones
on this new CD, quite an ‘A-team’ of the English early music
scene.

BWV 12 is one of
the numerous examples amongst the Bach cantatas in which initial
suffering (“weeping, sighing, sorrowing, crying, / grief and
pain / are the lot of Christian men”) is either transformed
into joy and a sense of bliss or, at least, into a confident
hope of, a sure faith in, future security (“What God does is
well done indeed / … like a father he will hold / and shield
me in his arm, / protect me from all harm”). The opening Sinfonia
is heart-wrenching and sets the tone for an initial chorus in
which the smallness of the chorus gives a profoundly personal
tone to what can otherwise seem simply a doctrinal assertion;
here it is very much felt experience, a lesson learned the hard
way. The interaction of solo voices makes it feel almost like
a conversation, an active realisation of the shared truth of
experience. The succeeding arias maintain this sense of discovery
(perhaps particularly so in Michael Chance’s performance of
‘Kreuz und Kronen sind verbunden’ the pivotal section of the
cantata), of thought and feeling in progress, reaching a degree
of stability and unanimity in the closing chorale.

‘Gleichwie der regen
und Schnee vom Himmel fällt’ has about it a degree of self-reflexivity,
since its theme is essentially that of the operation of God’s
word amongst men; it moves towards the final chorale’s plea:
“Oh Lord, with all my heart I pray / that you shall never take
/ your holy word out of my mouth, / then I shall not be prey
/ to guilt and sin”. The relationship between singing God’s
word (or hearing it sung) and the living of a Christian life
is here made more explicit than is often the case in the cantatas,
and all the soloists, especially in the long Recitative which
dominates the cantata, sing with both a sense of drama and also,
paradoxically, a sufficient detachment to suggest that the words
are a reflection on what they have observed of life, as well
as their own experience of the moral struggle of the Christian
life. This is a performance which respects the ideas as well
as the emotions in Erdmann Neumeister’s text, particularly striking
in the almost meditative tread of the closing chorale.

In BWV 61 – the
first of Bach’s cantatas to take Martin Luther’s Advent hymn
as its starting point, the second being BWV 62, composed some
ten years later – the interplay of voices and instruments, each
allowed equal weight, in the opening setting of the hymn is
particularly fine, an effective prelude to a cantata text which
has less sense of thematic or emotional progression than many,
the sense of joy and wonder which crowns its end unmistakably
implicit in its opening lines. Emma Kirkby’s radiant performance
of the closing aria (in which the accompanying strings are ravishingly
eloquent) feels like compellingly satisfying resolution of all
that makes up the musical and textual logic of what has gone
before, and is one of the highlights of the disc. Here the closing
chorale is almost antic-climactic.

‘Komm, du susse
Todesstunde’ begins with a gorgeously seductive invitation to
death (“Come, sweet hour of my death, / that I with haste /
may honey taste / from the lion’s tainted breath”), the words
of a protagonist at least half-in-love with easeful death, but
not, of course, as Keatsian escape into oblivion – the desire
here is very much ‘to put on immortality / in heavenly eternity’.
Michael Chance sings the opening aria exceptionally well, with
a perception of note and word alike (and of the relationship
between them) that is evident in every phrase. Again the balance
between voice and accompaniment is supremely well judged. Charles
Daniels is heard at something like his best in the second aria
of the cantata (‘Mein Verlangen ist’) bringing out, without
overstatement or unnecessary rhetoric, Bach’s potent contrast
between the “mortal ash and clay” on the one hand, and the “the
soul’s pure radiant light” on the other.

This undirected
group of soloists and instrumentalists works together with impressive
cohesiveness. Without the sense – which in other kinds of performance
one can never quite escape, for good or ill – of the personality
and interpretative of a ‘dominant’ conductor, these performances
achieve a real air of being what one might reasonably think
of as ‘spiritual conversations’. One has a sense of views and
experiences shared and exchanged and, out of that interchange,
of the emergence of a kind of consensus, a shared affirmation
of faith expressed in the closing chorales. Larger scale performances
of the cantatas can make one reach for theatrical metaphors;
here, as I have suggested, one thinks more readily of a kind
of heightened conversation. OVPP, and the associated effects
on other issues of musical scale, serves these early cantatas
very well.

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